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Prof’s fear of pronoun punishment is all too plausible: DiManno

I don’t want to be mean. I don’t want to be crabby. I don’t want to be scornful and sarcastic.

It’s all too easy to slip into each of those states of commentary when addressing the weekend forum at University of Toronto, featuring psychology Professor Jordan Peterson as the antichrist and two very hostile opponents, on the subject of gender-gerrymandered pronouns.

They do make it damn near irresistible to mock, however, particularly at an event which began with the dean of arts and sciences offering an obsequious tribute to the indigenous people who once occupied the land beneath our feet and an oh-so-coddling assurance from the moderator that “support” was available just outside for anyone, you know, traumatized by the discussion. (“Trigger warnings” is the contemporary argot on campuses across Canada and the United States, with some offering “safe zones” to shield students — delicate creatures that they apparently are — from lecturers and guest speakers who might provoke anxiety attacks among the vulnerable by their remarks.)

Free speech — which was the gist of the parley — is quite demonstrably under attack from all sides. Because everybody is superficially for it, of course, the free expression of ideas and views, but with strings attached, which entirely defeats the purpose.

Canada, I’m sad to say, is less muscular in its defence of free speech than America. In the U.S., free speech — imbued with false news, “post-truth,” especially on right-wing social-media platforms — warped into just the kind of scaremongering that helped get Donald Trump elected as the 45th president. That’s not a failing of free speech; it’s the nature of idiocy, where a large swath of public seeks out content not for enlightenment but to validate their own nasty views and grudges.

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Peterson has gained notoriety for his refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns when addressing students, a position he made clear on three videos posted to YouTube and which drew a pair of sharp reprimands from the university.

The professor was not being paranoid when he fretted that the next avenue likely to be pursued by his avowed enemies — in light of Bill C-16, passed on Friday, which extends federal protection against hate propaganda based on gender identity and expression, and existing provincial human-rights commissions — will be to have his clinical licence revoked.

“I think where I’m most vulnerable in this entire debate, and I expect this will happen and there’s already been noise about this on the Ontario Psychological Association website, is they’ll probably come after my clinical licence.”

I wrote about the U of T event in Sunday’s paper but did not pay sufficient attention to the what-comes-next potential, with Peterson specifically but anybody who would dare defy the language proscriptions of the Ontario Human Rights Code. Just last week, the commission issued a statement clarifying its position: Refusing to refer to a person by their self-identified pronouns could constitute gender-based harassment; refusing to refer to a transgendered person by their chosen personal pronoun, matching their gender self-identity, will likely be considered discrimination when it takes place in an arena covered by the Code, including employment, housing and services such as education.

What does this mean in practice?

The federal law is merely playing catch-up with provincial human-rights legislation, stressed debater Brenda Cossman, U of T law professor and director of sexual diversity studies at the institution.

The Supreme Court of Canada has set a high threshold for hate speech that won’t be protected under Charter freedom of speech provisions, defined as “the unusually strong and deep-felt emotions of vilification and detestation,” Cossman noted. Criminal charges for a hate-speech offence can only be laid with the consent of the Attorney General.

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Soon to become law, Bill C-16 has no impact on pronoun usage, said Cossman, unless an accused was misusing pronouns while assaulting, sexually assaulting or murdering somebody.

In a reasonable world, the bill does not turn the Criminal Code on its gender-claptrap head, as Peterson has warned. “You don’t get to go to jail!” countered Cossman, as if Peterson was somehow wrapping himself in a martyr’s cloak and would actually like to end up behind bars, if only to prove: Told ’ya.

Yet, turning her attention to human-rights codes, which are not based on constitutional law, Cossman described a quite alarming scenario.

“Criminal laws involve imprisonment; civil laws involve damages and restitution. An Ontario Human Rights Commission offence will result in a financial or a non-financial penalty such as re-hiring or training. So what happens if a person refuses to pay the fine? You don’t get to go to jail. I’m sorry, you don’t. The mechanisms of civil enforcement come into effect.”

The two most common forms of enforcing judgments are seizure and sale of assets. And if a person’s assets do not sufficiently cover the fine, then wages will be garnished. “It’s about money,” said Cossman.

“So yes, it’s true, your assets might be seized, your income might be garnished, but you don’t get to go to jail.”

That’s OK then?

But that’s precisely the Orwellian world that Peterson has been railing against, the compelling of nomenclature.

An individual who defies the jackbooting of vocabulary fascists, who won’t comply with preferred pronouns — and to be clear, Peterson does not stand accused of doing this yet; he’s merely declared he will not do so — can find himself, herself, themselves, stripped of a job, fined, have assets seized and wages garnisheed, or be forcibly trotted off to some kind of language gulag where they can be retrained as per the ideological gospels.

Language is the essence of civilization. And what’s envisioned here, expanding from the bare-bones doctrine of gender-neutral or gender-contrived pronouns, would indeed be a reverberating cultural revolution.

Peterson hasn’t got that wrong. It is fundamentalist and totalitarian intrusion into people’s lives. Good intentions don’t render it any less execrable.

“I just sat in my bloody office at home and threw up a couple of amateurish videos, more or less attempting to articulate my feelings about a couple of policies, and it’s like all hell broke loose. Why? Because that hell is right underneath the surface.”

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